Related Books: Tradition and Religion Today, Prophets, Saints, Sages, and Teachers, Christianity and Hesychasm

Library Journal  
This is a detailed account of Lewis's twenties, during which, while living with Mrs. Janie Moore and her daughter Maureen, he struggled to win a fellowship at Oxford. Though cut by one-third, it may still prove tedious to all but Lewis's most devoted followers. Written at least partly for the entertainment of Moore (identified as ``D''), the diary dwells on Lewis's friends, books, and reactions to the surrounding landscape, rarely on the inner circumstances that would soon prompt his conversion to Christianity. Lewis's diary does, however, furnish a vivid picture of post-World War I Oxford and helps explain the easy erudition he brought to such works as The Allegory of Love . Owen Barfield's foreword is helpful, but Hooper's notes are virtually useless.-- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
 
National Review  
It is likely . . . that the Moore-Lewis liaison was sexual at its origin,as Walter Hooper cogently argues in his introduction. . . . Mrs. Moore, who urged her unenthusiastic consort to keep the diary in the first place, is its primary audience. . . . We have only a fourth of what Mrs. Moore heard, but it is a provocative, amusing, sometimes gripping, and always interesting (though not uniformly engaging) fourth. Hooper's transitional commentary is elegant and adroit, his notes often compelling, and his Biographical Appendix indispensable. The thread of arresting and indefatigable intellect, foreshadowing not only greatness but specific themes (and even specific passages) in Lewis's later writing, intertwined with the threads of prolonged adolescence, quotidian busyness, . . . and what would later prove to be settled habit (much talking and walking)--all these, in Hooper's editing, make for a seamless fabric.
 
Publishers Weekly  
As an Oxford undergraduate, Lewis set up house with Janie King Moore, a woman 26 years his senior who was separated from her husband, and her daughter Maureen. Lewis's liaison with ``Mrs. Moore,'' which he kept secret from his father, was probably sexual, according to Hooper, Lewis's biographer and personal secretary. This diary, a disarming self-portrait of Lewis as sensual, self-assured atheist and clandestine family man will chiefly interest scholars and hardcore Lewis devotees. Mostly a humdrum, skeletal recital of household chores, conversations and the academic grind, the journal's tedium is relieved by soaring passages on nature's beauty, thumbnail sketches of Lewis's friends and quick comments on his wide-ranging reading, from Beowulf to Hardy, Nietzsche, Jung and Havelock Ellis. (July)